Until Domesday...

Further to my comment in my post of September 28th last year "Slow-Tech", doubting whether anyone is still referencing the 1986, computer-based Domesday Project, and referencing a thought I had the other day about the dangers of relying solely on digitised data, no matter how well backed-up and redundantly duplicated it might be; prompted me to compare and contrast the 1086 Domesday with its millennial counterpart at a distance of just under forty years since the government/BBC backed project was finished. The original manuscripts of the Great and the Little Domesday are still in existence, at the National Archives in Kew: nine-hundred and twenty-eight years after having been written. The 1986 Project in its original form lasted less than twenty years in practical terms, due to the inevitable obsolescence of the technology employed in its construction, most notably the storage and delivery medium used: the LaserDisc, an analogue video stream capable of being accessed frame by frame randomly, or rendering continuously as video. Embedded data streams could also be encoded onto the format. All of the above required a connected computer running proprietary software to retrieve and display the information as required.

The LaserDisc is now a museum-grade curiosity, as too are the computers and software that were used to access and display the information, the system rapidly becoming a retro curio of a past decade. Since around 2002, various schemes have attempted to find other ways of using the data for archival as well as direct use. But, even the recently transcribed versions will still be subject to inevitable tech obsolescence, online or no, as it is practically infeasible to archive everything that passes through the fibres of the internet in even a basic record, let alone with full, original functionality: a trawl of the Internet Archive is [often mute] testimony to that: web standards change every few years, in any case. But the original 1086 Domesday manuscripts have been typeset and translated many times over the last [nearly] one thousand years, stored on media that require no ancillary tech to access it, and with many, many copies of those renderings stored multiply around the world in libraries and educational establishments. That the original documents are still in existence is proof absolute that text is still the pre-eminent method of archival data-storage - bulky, inconvenient, and slow to search, admittedly: but safe and future-proof, nevertheless...